| Creating a tech brand to compete with Uber using UXR
Great Freight
How I created the brand and design foundations for a Forbes’ rising star looking to disrupt the $800 billion dollar freight industry and developed a significant feature pitch for our app.
My Role:
Associate Creative Director, (Product)
User Researcher
Stakeholders:
Director of Product Design
Director of Marketing
Senior Executive Team
Timeline:
3 months
Team:
Me, myself, and I
00.
it was looking to solve the inefficiencies of drayage while also competing with Amazon, Convoy, and, our number one competitor, Uber Freight, to become the preferred freight-tech platform of independent truckers.
NEXT Trucking was ambitious,
But as a business and brand in its infancy, it lacked a brand position and point of view for
it’s product and design.
Primed by years in brand and visual design, I led the task to establish this sans support of any external partners.
01.
I first created a research outline, identifying the broad goals of what I wanted to learn about how our marketplace drivers saw NEXT:
• What was our NPS?
• How would they describe NEXT?
• What is their best memory of working with us?
• Did our app succeed, or not, in helping plan their jobs and, thus, their income?
02.
I advocated for, and secured, a small budget to incentivize our marketplace drivers to take a survey to get the answers to those questions—
receiving a ton of quantitative and qualitative data from 175 drivers.
“
left more motivated to succeed
success will be only a matter of time
”
“Making $400 in one hour”
“
end of last year when the rates were higher
When loads started to pay different on July 11th
”
After coding and synthesizing the data,
6.33 NPS
we averaged at a
And identified the following themes:
Opportunity
Efficient
Reliable
Trustworthy
Cool
Indifferent
Untrustworthy
02.
I applied the Aaker framework to this data to determine what dimensions of personality our brand occupied:
I iterated off those traits and the themes in our data until I created our brand tenents:
🗽
Celebrate Independence
The path you choose is yours and you own your opportunities. We give you innovative tools to build the life you want, as flexibly as you want. It’s your road, your rules.
We know it takes a long time to earn trust, and just a moment to break it— that’s why we don’t run from our mistakes. We know a lot of people rely on you, you can rely on us.
💯
Practice Reliability
📣
Live Boldly
We’re not afraid of anyone or any challenge— we solve the problems the industry has head-on. We’re here to be seen, heard, and bring others along for the ride. We’re riding shotgun as you drive, hammer-down, to the top.
🦸🏽♂️
Be The Best Human
We exist to make lives better by simplifying technology and making every day easier than the day before. We work to solve the problems users don’t know they have, so that the most stressful part of their day is deciding when to be done.
03.
Those brand tenets became the backbone for creating NEXT’s design principles:
Reduce Friction as Priority
Let the user’s intuition decide the experience: solve for immediate understanding and eradicate any room for error. Define what seamlessness means both in our interfaces and the physical journey a driver experiences in completing a job from our app.
Context as Definition
Consider the relevance, perspective, environment, circumstances, ease, and user story of your design.
Understand when to best use innovation in your specific context to excite and engage the user.
Value the Craft
Every element in your design is a building block of our commitment to delivering both an optimal experience and a cohesive concept or narrative, reinforcing brand equity and, ultimately, driving preference.
Consistency is Key
Design within the perspective of an ecosystem that shares rhythm. Ensure that cross-functional design is utilizing the harmony of the broader system so that a viewer would recognize them as a family.
